Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.

People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' In the first place I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea it's too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.

It is impossible to have progress without conscience

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

Basically painting is total idiocy.

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

An empty canvas is full only if you want it to be full.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.

The working process is ideally freeing my mind.

I don't mess around with my subconscious

I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

Curiosity is the main energy.

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.

My art is about paying attention - about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary

You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.

A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliché. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built in.

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'.. .I could never see these qualities in paint - I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.

I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.

Work is my joy... Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do.

I still have a struggle reading (dyslexia, fh) and so I don't read much.. ..Probably the only reason I'm painter is because I couldn't read yet I love to write, but when I write I know what I'm writing, but when I'm reading I can't see it, because it goes from all sides of the page at once. But that's very good for printmaking.

I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.

Art is a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.

I feel strong in my belief, based on my widely traveled collaborations, that a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers, and is the most non-elitist way to share information, hopefully seducing us into creating mutual understandings for the benefit of all.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway

For me there is no difference between art and life.

I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.